Excess of every kind is bad.
I left Pesaro delighted with the good company I had met, and only sorry I had not seen the marquis’s brother who was praised by everyone.
CHAPTER XX
A Jew Named Mardocheus Becomes My Travelling Companion— He Persuades Me to Lodge in His House—I Fall in Love With His Daughter Leah—After a Stay of Six Weeks I Go to Trieste
Some time elapsed before I had time to examine the Marquis of Mosca’s collection of Latin poets, amongst which the ‘Priapeia’ found no place.
No doubt this work bore witness to his love for literature but not to his learning, for there was nothing of his own in it. All he had done was to classify each fragment in chronological order. I should have liked to see notes, comments, explanations, and such like; but there was nothing of the kind. Besides, the type was not elegant, the margins were poor, the paper common, and misprints not infrequent. All these are bad faults, especially in a work which should have become a classic. Consequently, the book was not a profitable one; and as the marquis was not a rich man he was occasionally reproached by his wife for the money he had expended.
I read his treatise on almsgiving and his apology for it, and understood a good deal of the marquis’s way of thinking. I could easily imagine that his writings must have given great offence at Rome, and that with sounder judgment he would have avoided this danger. Of course the marquis was really in the right, but in theology one is only in the right when Rome says yes.
The marquis was a rigorist, and though he had a tincture of Jansenism he often differed from St. Augustine.
He denied, for instance, that almsgiving could annul the penalty attached to sin, and according to him the only sort of almsgiving which had any merit was that prescribed in the Gospel: “Let not thy right hand know what thy left hand doeth.”
He even maintained that he who gave alms sinned unless it was done with the greatest secrecy, for alms given in public are sure to be accompanied by vanity.